A method of processing nonconductive materials such as ferro-concretes containing conductive materials such as reinforcements and recycling the processed materials to manufacture new nonconductive materials is known as described in A. F. Usov, B. V. Siomkin and N. T. Zinovyev, "TRANSITIONAL PROCESSES IN THE PLANTS USING IMPULSE TECHNOLOGIES" (Leningrad: Nauka, 1987), page 189. In this method, waste ferro-concretes are placed in the water, are crushed by electric discharge and further smashed to pieces. Ferro reinforcements are removed from the smashed waste ferro-concretes, and water containing the smashed pieces of concrete, which was used in crushing or smashing of nonconductive materials, is removed by a pump. New ferro-concretes are manufactured using the pieces as raw materials.
In the above method, however, a very large amount of energy is required to crush the ferro-concretes. As a result, all of the ferro-concretes are no crushed and recycled, so that the amount of recycled ferro-concretes is reduced.
The above defect is partially solved by the method described in page 96 of "RECYCLING OF CONCRETES" (Moscow, Stroyiztat, 1988) by B. V. Gusev and V. A. Zagurskiy. According to this method, waste ferro-concretes are preliminarily crushed by a crushing machine and ferro reinforcements are then removed from the crushed waste ferro-concretes and melted. After the crushed concrete is further smashed to pieces, the crushed concrete is classified by size and kind of pieces. The classified pieces of concrete are mixed to manufacture a new mixture of concrete.
In the above method, however, the optimum amount of the electro impulse and electric-physical properties of crushed concrete is not considered. Accordingly, there is the problem that a voltage required for crushing of concrete cannot be adjusted, so that concretes cannot be crushed with an efficient use of energy. Further, all of the processed products such as crushed and smashed concrete materials and ferro reinforcements cannot be recycled as raw materials of new concrete and the problem that the amount of recycled waste ferro-concretes is low is not solved.
It is an object of the present invention to solve the above problems in the prior art by providing a method or an apparatus for crushing or smashing nonconductive materials such as waste ferro-concretes with reduced consumption of energy and capable of recycling almost all of the crushed or smashed non-conductive materials to produce new nonconductive raw materials.